1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally directed to processing EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) transactions, and more specifically directed to translating from an inbound EDI transaction to one or more outbound EDI transactions and/or other outputs.
2. Background Art
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a set of standards for structuring information to be electronically exchanged between organizations (often called “trading partners”). In essence, EDI standards represent common languages through which trading partners may electronically communicate. Existing EDI standards include X12, HL7 and EDIFACT.
While EDI has helped to standardize electronic communication between organizations, challenges still exist. For example, organizations who wish to electronically communicate may not support or use the same EDI standard. In other cases, organizations may use the same EDI standard, but not the same version of the standard. In such cases, EDI messages must be translated from the EDI standard/version used by the sender to the EDI standard/version used by the receiver.
Also, there are instances where a given EDI transaction must be forwarded to a number of trading partners. Such destination trading partners may support different EDI standards/versions (relative to the sender, and/or to each other). Accordingly, it is necessary to translate the inbound EDI transaction to forms that are compatible with the destination trading partners.
Conventional approaches for translating EDI transactions, particularly when a given EDI transaction must be translated to forms compatible with multiple trading partners, are cumbersome, time-consuming and inefficient. Therefore, what is needed are improved systems, methods and computer program products for translating an inbound EDI transaction to forms compatible with one or more destination trading partners.